In a report on the new Team Blog of the free CIFS/ SMB server, Samba declares, “We now have a Samba Team member working at Microsoft!” says the blog and goes on to explain that Hertel therefore had to found a consulting company and “hire a few people.” His company will create protocol documentation for the print and print-server for Windows clients which will then be published and made freely available on the Microsoft website.

The Samba team is overjoyed. “This is the first Microsoft-sponsored SMB/CIFS documentation to be made available without restrictions since the 1997 IETF draft specifications.” The first part, around 500 pages covering the implementation of SMB protocol in Windows NT, should become available in a few months.

Elsewhere in the blog, the Samba developers report “lively discussions” about the interoperability of Samba 4 with Windows 8, with some “very interesting bugs” being found and fixed by developer Matthieu Patou: “A misplaced 0 or the PAC in the wrong position in a list can have big consequences in the world of AD interop!”

The project will use the blog to keep its readers up to date with technical developments. Consequently the blog closes with details of the latest version, Samba 3.0.36, released on August 5.

Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.